A Week of Mysteries, Sad Stories, and Irish Rebels at Number 2

16 new, 4 survivors, and a cassette four-track turned all the way up

16 new entries. For the third consecutive week, the chart has rebuilt itself almost from scratch, and the question of what constitutes stability in this format is starting to answer itself: nothing does. The 4 survivors are all further down. Boards of Canada, number 1 for the past 2 weeks, have slipped to 5. Stormkeep, number 2 last week, are at 20 — an 18-place slide, though on a chart with this turnover rate, the fact that they are still here at all separates them from the 16 entries that left without a trace.

The new number 1 belongs to a man who has released more than 30 albums under at least 6 different band names. He recorded this one on a cassette four-track with everything turned all the way up. 6 tracks. 250 copies pressed.

We start at 20.

Still here, barely

Stormkeep were at number 2 last week. Now they are at 20. In isolation, that looks like freefall. In context, it looks like survival. 16 entries from last week left the chart entirely this week — vanished, replaced, gone. Stormkeep fell 18 places but stayed. On a chart that replaces 80% of itself every 7 days, the bottom rung is still the chart. Whether that qualifies as persistence or a slow goodbye is a question for next week.

Five languages, one coastline

Nu Genea enter at 19 with People of the Moon. Massimo Di Lena and Lucio Aquilina are from Naples, and their previous records channelled the city’s funk, disco, and library music heritage with enough warmth that even the ugliest February felt like a coastal road through a car window. The new album sings in Neapolitan, Arabic, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Tom Misch guests on a track that splits the difference between London brit-funk and something considerably further south. María José Llergo brings flamenco palmas to another. These are the same 2 producers who once recorded an entire album of experiments with Tony Allen. The range should not be surprising. It still is.

Lb Honne takes 18 with present future / here there. Deep house, ambient, minimal techno, downtempo. The title does the describing.

The priest, again

Father Dionysios Tabakis re-enters at 17 with Paradise Metal. First charted at 13 two weeks ago. Dropped off. Came back. A 52-year-old Greek Orthodox priest playing fretless electric guitar through amplifier worship, 150 copies pressed on Athens’ Heat Crimes label, and a geographic spread wider than nearly anything else on this chart: listeners in 21 countries. Sacred music has no obvious constituency in a format like this, and yet it keeps finding one.

Warsaw, Wrocław, and the space between

Poland sends 2 records to the same chart from opposite ends of the genre map.

ETNOBOTANIKA enters at 16 with Fruwający Przestępca (Deluxe Edition), an ambient house and trip-hop record — slow, aquatic, built for late hours. Błoto + Ion D enter at 4 with Atmosfera, a future jazz and experimental electronic record that layers hip-hop rhythms against psychedelia and improvisation. One is downtempo. The other is restless. Both are Polish, both arrived on the same day, and the fact that English-language music coverage has not yet noticed that Poland’s electronic scene is producing this range of output says more about the coverage than the scene.

2 records, 1 name, and a bassist who died in May 1994

Sophia holds 2 positions this week: Collections:One at 15 and People Are Like Seasons at 13. Both are pre-releases. Whether 2 separate albums is strategy or substance — whether these would have been a double album on a different platform — is a question for the artist. What matters here is the story behind the name.

Robin Proper-Sheppard grew up in Chula Vista, California, a stone’s throw from the Mexican border. He left for New York, taught himself guitar in a tenement apartment, came back, and talked bassist Jimmy Fernandez and drummer Ronald Austin into following him east. New York didn’t take. Connecticut didn’t take. They spent their last savings on flights to England with 2 guitars and a drum kit, slept rough in Camden, and eventually landed on Fiction Records — home of The Cure — recording under the name The God Machine.

2 albums. Alternative Press would later rank the second, One Last Laugh in a Place of Dying, among the 90 greatest of the decade. Dark, orchestral, furious, and beautiful in a way that made everyone who heard it feel privately certain they had discovered something the world had missed. Then Jimmy Fernandez went to hospital with a headache. He died of a brain haemorrhage on May 23, 1994. He was 28.

Proper-Sheppard has never performed a God Machine song since. Not once. He started Sophia 2 years later — Greek for wisdom — on his own label, The Flower Shop Recordings. The music is quiet where The God Machine was loud, built on a grief that refused to resolve itself into acceptance and instead became its own genre. Malcolm Middleton of Arab Strap wrote a song about him. He sang REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Lovin’ You” at Middleton’s wedding. He has lived in Brussels and Berlin. He has made 6 studio albums across 3 decades, and 2 of them are on this chart right now.

Uplifting trance, twice

Trance appears at 2 positions on a chart that also contains anarcho-punk, pagan black metal, sadcore, and a remix album illustrated with furry art. We did not expect this sentence.

Lange Ft. Skye enters at 14 with Drifting Away, a vocal trance single. The Thrillseekers Present Hydra enters at 3 with Altered State (Extended Mixes), uplifting and progressive trance in extended mix format. Steve Helstrip has been recording as The Thrillseekers since the late 1990s, and the Hydra alias carries the melodic end of his output. The genre has been declared dead at regular intervals since approximately 2003. It continues to have other plans.

The Thirty Years’ War, scored for blast beats

Horn/Licht Erlischt… enters at 12 with Apokalyps 1618. A solo project from Paderborn, Germany, with more than 20 releases on Bandcamp. The title references the year the Thirty Years’ War began. Song titles in historical German. The sound folds atmospheric black metal into folk elements and funeral doom. A one-person war record about a 17th-century war, at number 12 on its first week. Pre-release; the album drops in June.

A bright orange J-card from 1978

Cirith Ungol take their name from a Tolkien fortress and recorded The Orange Album in July and August 1978, in Ventura, California, at a studio called Liquid Flames. 4 lead vocalists across 11 tracks. The demo was dubbed onto cassettes with a bright orange J-card and handed to record companies who were looking for the next Van Halen. Nobody called back.

The band went on to self-release Frost and Fire in 1981 and spend 4 decades becoming one of the most revered cult acts in doom and epic metal. The Orange Album disappeared. A cassette reissue in 2020, limited to 666 copies, was the first time it had been available in any format for over 40 years. Now, in 2026, the first-ever vinyl pressing: 200 on black wax, 800 on orange, 3 test pressings in the world. A 1978 demo entering a worldwide chart 48 years after it was recorded. Number 11.

Anthro art and kawaii future bass

r u s s e l b u c k enters at 10 with RAVEPOP REMIXES. The genre tags read like a time capsule from a future that already happened: hyperpop, rave, Y2K electronic, kawaii future bass. The cover art features anthropomorphic characters drawn in a style that places the project squarely inside the furry music community — a scene with its own festivals, its own visual language, and its own economy that mainstream music coverage pretends not to notice. 29 releases on Skaldera. Number 10 on a worldwide chart. The scene does not need the coverage to exist.

A malfunctioning Mellotron and a band that may never have existed

Spratleys enter at 9 with PONY, and explaining what this record is requires a brief excursion into one of British music’s more elaborate fictions.

Tim Smith was the frontman of Cardiacs — the cult psychedelic prog band from Kingston upon Thames who spent 3 decades being too strange for the mainstream and too brilliant for the underground. In the late 1990s, he created Spratleys Japs as a side project with his then-partner Joanne Spratley. The album credits an American bar band called The Rev-Ups, recorded at a studio called Sparrow Wars in the New Forest. No evidence that The Rev-Ups ever existed has surfaced. No evidence that the studio exists either. Smith and Spratley are believed to be the only musicians on the record.

The sound was reportedly built around a malfunctioning Mellotron — a keyboard that plays pre-recorded tape strips of real instruments and that, when it breaks, produces sounds no functioning machine would generate. PONY came out in 1999. The band never played live. Smith suffered a near-fatal stroke in 2008 that ended his performing career. He died in 2020. A remastered vinyl reissue arrived recently, and here it sits at number 9 on a worldwide chart: a record made by people who may not have existed, on an instrument that was not working correctly, from a studio that cannot be found.

Pete Townshend’s synthesizers and a parent-friendly curfew

The Anchoress enters at 8 with As We Once Were, a pre-release due August 7. Catherine Anne Davies is a Welsh multi-instrumentalist, producer, and classically trained flautist whose previous album, The Art of Losing, hit the UK Top 40, was named one of Elton John’s favourite records of 2021, and sold over 10,000 physical copies on nothing but word of mouth. 3 Music Producers Guild nominations. A professor of music production and songwriting at ICMP & SAE. The phrase “singer-songwriter” starts to look like it was designed for a different job.

The new record was self-produced at Black Lodge Studios with access to Pete Townshend’s personal collection of vintage analogue synthesizers. Written in the aftermath of the birth of her first child and the discovery of her grandmother’s voice on a cassette tape found in her mother’s attic. The lead single is called “I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy.” It features Welsh-Cornish musician Gwenno, and Davies described it as an anthem for anyone written off for daring to procreate. The album launch at London’s 100 Club has a parent-friendly 10pm curfew. She has also launched a podcast called The Milk & The Music, about the music industry’s motherhood penalty. The pre-release is at number 8.

An artist who stops taking his medication to draw

Rudimentary Peni enter at 7 with The E.P.'s of R.P., a compilation of the band’s first 2 EPs from 1981 and 1982. Sealed Records confirmed new reissues for 2026, which explains the reappearance of music nearly 4 decades old.

The band formed in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, in 1980. Nick Blinko on guitar and vocals — credited as “mouth-guitar-pen,” with pen referring to his role as the illustrator of every record cover the band has ever produced. Grant Matthews on bass. Jon Greville on drums. They emerged from the anarcho-punk scene around Crass, released 3 studio albums and 6 EPs between 1981 and 2009, toured only briefly, gave almost no interviews, and allowed almost no photographs. What they left behind was the music and the artwork.

Blinko’s artwork is in the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne — the same institution that holds Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger. Densely packed pen-and-ink drawings of skulls, figures, demons, and obsessive patterns, executed without magnifying lenses in sessions that can last 18 hours, compared by Colin Rhodes to Bosch, Bruegel, and the late Goya. Blinko has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and hospitalised under Section 3 of the UK Mental Health Act. The medication that stabilises him suppresses his ability to draw. His London art dealer, Henry Boxer, described the arrangement in 5 words: he compromises his sanity to create.

The concept album Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric was reportedly written while Blinko was detained in hospital, experiencing delusions that he was Pope Adrian IV — a historical figure who shared his initials. His semi-autobiographical novel, The Primal Screamer, is written as a therapist’s journal about a patient who starts a band that is never named. First editions of his art book fetch up to $5,000.

The EPs compiled here are 26 minutes of fast, dark, astonishingly catchy punk. Number 7 on a chart in 2026. The drawings are still being made.

Underground, holding

BoriRock holds at 6 with Supreme Zinger, underground East Coast hip-hop on its first week. The audience is overwhelmingly American.

From the summit, settling

Boards of Canada fall to 5 with Inferno. 2 weeks at the top, and now the pre-order is settling into something resembling a normal chart life. The album drops May 29. 3 weeks on the chart. The silence-breaking margin that made the rest of the field look like a footnote has narrowed, but the record is still here, which is more than most first weeks manage.

An Irish word for warrior, reclaimed

KNEECAP climb 7 places to number 2 with FENIAN. The Belfast trio — Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara, DJ Próvaí — rap primarily in Irish with English woven throughout, and the new album is their second on Heavenly Recordings, produced by Dan Carey, the same producer behind Fontaines D.C., Wet Leg, and Kae Tempest.

The album opens with samples from RÓIS, the Fermanagh-born composer and electronic artist whose debut MO LÉAN won the 2025 RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards for Best Emerging Artist and Best Original Folk Track. RÓIS recently played a double-bill with Brìghde Chaimbeul — the Scottish smallpipes player from the Isle of Skye whom readers of this blog may remember from “Shooting in the Dark” — at the Belfast Empire. A vocalist who blends sean-nós singing with electronics, sampled on a Belfast hip-hop record, performing alongside a Scottish piper who runs her instrument through effects pedals: the Gaelic music scene across both islands is smaller, more interconnected, and more alive than its absence from mainstream coverage would suggest.

The road to FENIAN was not simple. KNEECAP lost their US visa sponsor after messages about the Gaza genocide displayed onstage at Coachella. A North American tour was cancelled. Mo Chara spent part of the recording period in a London court on a terrorism-related charge for allegedly displaying a Hezbollah flag during a show; the charge was dismissed. The group finished an entire follow-up to their debut Fine Art with a different producer, decided it sounded too similar, scrapped it, and sought out Carey specifically to push themselves somewhere harder to reach. The result moves through acid house, trip-hop, and dubstep alongside the drill and rave of the debut. Lankum’s Radie Peat guests. Palestinian rapper Fawzi appears on a track called “Palestine.” Kae Tempest closes the album.

The title is the reclamation. Fenian: an ancient Irish warrior, a word later adopted by Irish rebels, more recently turned into a sectarian slur against Irish people in the North. KNEECAP’s self-titled biopic won a BAFTA for Outstanding Debut. Mid-week projections had this album as the frontrunner for the UK Albums Chart. 2 weeks on this chart, a peak at 2, and a 7-place climb in a single week.

6 songs, 2 takes, everything in the red

John Dwyer takes number 1 with HEATHEN AXE.

The record was made on a Vestax MR44 cassette four-track. Dwyer bought one recently — the same model he used to record Coachwhips material and early OCS sessions in the years before those projects evolved into what the world would come to know as Osees. The Vestax MR44 is, in his words, the best-sounding four-track ever made. He spent a week writing riffs, brought them to bassist Tom Dolas and drummer John Hodge, ran the songs once as rehearsal, and recorded them on the second pass. Loosely improvised and unhinged. Everything turned all the way up.

Mastered by Weasel Walter — the Brooklyn no-wave multi-instrumentalist and composer who has appeared on more than 200 recordings and who mastered Coachwhips and early OCS sessions for Dwyer years ago. The choice of mastering engineer is not incidental. It is a return to the exact people and equipment that produced the earliest, most feral version of the sound.

This is a man who has released 28 studio albums with Osees under at least 6 different iterations of the name: OCS, The Ohsees, Thee Oh Sees, Oh Sees, Osees. He founded Castle Face Records in 2006 because, in his telling, nobody else was willing to put out his records. The label went on to release Ty Segall, White Fence, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, and the Fresh & Onlys. He has fronted Coachwhips, Pink and Brown, The Hospitals, and recorded solo as Damaged Bug. Osees’ 29th studio album, Abomination Revealed At Last, is also due. The man’s discography is not a body of work. It is a weather system.

Heathen Axe is none of that. It is 3 people, a four-track, and 6 songs recorded before anyone could overthink them. The vinyl is limited to 250 copies. The audience is roughly 9 out of 10 American. The label is called Deathgod Corp. The instructions on the Bandcamp page say: PLAY LOUD. FOR FANS OF MAINLINER, HIGH RISE, COMETS ON FIRE, HAIR POLICE.

Number 1 on a worldwide chart.

The week in full

16 new entries for the third week running. A 1978 demo tape and a 1999 album recorded on a broken Mellotron by a band that might never have existed. An outsider artist whose drawings hang in Lausanne. A bassist who died in 1994, and the project his bandmate built from the silence. A Belfast trio climbing 7 places with an album named after a reclaimed slur. A Greek priest with 150 pressed copies, back for a second pass at the chart. Furry art and kawaii future bass at number 10. And at the top, 6 songs on a cassette four-track, 250 copies pressed, 2 takes, everything in the red.

The full chart is here. It resets next week. 3 consecutive weeks of near-total turnover suggest the only pattern is the absence of one.